He was a true scholar, a delightful conversationalist, and an uncompromising social activist.

This tension between Starlink’s dual role as technological infrastructure and as a geopolitical tool came into stark reality in Gaza.

For many centuries before partition and independence in I947 the type of government experienced by the peoples of the subcontinent of Asia was imposed by right of conquest; it lacked the ingredient of consent.

I first came to know Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in the formative years of my education and legal career. Mr Suhrawardy was a mentor, a role model, and an inspiration, both as a lawyer and a politician.

Suhrawardy’s popularity, unlike Jinnah’s, was rooted primarily in the regional sphere, though he enjoyed a strong base of mass support. Jinnah’s emergence as the architect of Pakistan owed considerably to Suhrawardy’s efforts, yet Suhrawardy, in turn, received comparatively little support from Jinnah.

Teacher, comrade, and lifelong revolutionary Badruddin Umar (20 December 1931 – 7 September 2025) is no more. We offer him our deepest respect and love. Alongside this, on behalf of the people of Bangladesh, we convey our gratitude — for he devoted his entire life, thought, and activism to the cause of the people.

Hasina took dynasty politics to levels we could not have ever imagined. What happened to Sheikh Mujib’s former residence was unfortunate. But I would say that Sheikh Hasina is partly responsible for the incident.

In the annals of modern Middle Eastern history, few documents have cast a longer or darker shadow than the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Both Bengals are grappling with intense periods of unrest. While the political events unfolding in these two lands may not align directly, they share one significant commonality: distrust.

“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” — Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 3.

The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.

While Europe experienced an age of evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century, political circumstances in India posed challenges to the work of missionary preaching.

The 1947 Partition of South Asia is usually associated with divisions, disruption, and the melancholia of displacement.

Reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation of Gaza is both illuminating and depressing.

In conversation with Salimullah Khan, one of Bangladesh’s most prominent public intellectuals and a professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at North South University.

While the July Uprising was sparked by economic problems, political repression, and a desire for democracy, it found a strong and surprising voice in a new form of music for Bangladesh: rap. Two songs, “Kotha Ko” (Speak Up) and “Awaz Utha” (Raise Your Voice), came to represent the sentiment of the movement in July.

In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.

The period between 1945 and 1979 was one of Cold War and decolonisation. The Cold War entered a different trajectory with the rapprochement between China and the US and the Iranian Revolution.

History has a cruel way of dimming the light of those who served with quiet dignity while amplifying the voices of those who demanded attention. In the pantheon of Bangladesh’s founding fathers, few figures have been as systematically overlooked—and arguably mistreated—as Tajuddin Ahmed, the nation’s first Prime Minister.

The Daily Star (TDS): How and when did you first come into contact with Tajuddin Ahmad?